The Medications That Actually Stop Alcohol Cravings

There are medications now available that can help to reduce people's desire to drink or the amount they drink and medications that will help them stop completely. Antabuse is a medication, a very old medication that if you just take an ant abuse pill in the morning, it's like swallowing an aspirin. It doesn't do anything. You don't feel

anything. But if you should drink within about 48 hours after taking that pill, you you'll get sick. You'll feel horrible, nauseous, vomit, etc. The

purpose is not to be on antabuse and make yourself sick. But knowing that that can happen frees you to not have to think about alcohol and helps you to control your impulse to drink. So that taking antabuse on a daily basis can be a very very effective way to jumpst start abstinence for people who want to stop drinking and are concerned that they may not have the impulse control to get even a few days of abstinence without the benefit of something like antabuse can also be used situationally.

and abuse. So that if somebody knows they're going into a high-risisk situation where they've stopped drinking for a while and now they're concerned that they're going to sort of go into lion's den like a patient of mine who was you know had an upcoming uh bachelor party to go to decided to take antabuse the day before the bachelor party so that he could get through it without returning to drinking. Worked well for him but doesn't take the ant abuse otherwise on a daily basis. There are

new medications like the GLP1 agonist like ompic and mjurro which can reduce the craving the appetitive drive for alcohol just like it helps people lose weight it controls their food consumption it can help to control their alcohol consumption and I have a number of patients who've been put on these medications by their primary care physicians who have gotten remarkably positive effects in terms of reducing their drinking or stopping altogether. So uh more research needs to be done. And there are some initial studies on these medications which are promising but it's not yet FDA approved for that purpose although physicians can prescribe it off label for that reason.

Uh and then there's nrexone which is probably the most popularized of these medications which can reduce the craving the desire to drink or limit the amount somebody drinks. In my experience it only works in less than about a third of cases. the majority of people don't get that benefit from it, but it's a pretty benign drug that doesn't have much in the way of side effects and so it's often worth a try to see if somebody will respond. But uh I don't have many

patients who take that medication for very long because they don't find it particularly helpful. And with the availability of these other newer drugs that work a lot better, uh I think it tends to be more the uh the option of choice. Although those medications can be quite expensive and that's a limiting factor.